Windborne

Windborne is a live weather wallpaper that quietly lives on your desktop — and a gentle, unobtrusive collection game. It paints the world's real weather as a hand-drawn map behind your windows: wind streams, rain falls, cyclones turn slowly. And when the right weather arrives, small visitors drift in on the wind — waiting to be noticed, and collected.

It never fights for your attention. No forced interaction, no punishment, no timers. Keep working, browsing, watching — the weather and its visitors simply drift by in the background. Glance over now and then, and you might find a rare guest who only came today.

A living weather map

• Real-time global weather, rendered by the wallpaper itself — a soft cartoon palette with ink coastlines only, no borders, no clutter

• Live wind-flow particle animation; switch between wind / rain / temperature color layers

• Live tropical cyclone tracking: past and forecast tracks, a category-colored spinning icon, particles swirling around active storms

• City labels in 中文 or English, switchable in one click

• Worldwide presets: global overview, continents, ocean basins, East Asia detail — or custom coordinates

Guests on the wind

Different weather brings different visitors. Clear skies, sudden rain, high winds, the edge of a rain band — each condition invites its own little creatures, each with its own rarity, coming and going with the weather. There's nothing to grind: leave it on your desktop, and the codex fills in on its own, day by day. Tend a small desktop ecosystem, too, and watch it grow with the weather and the hours.

Restraint by design

• Low-contrast, slow, and never in the way — it's wallpaper, not a pop-up

• Zero forced interaction, zero punishment: miss a moment and it's fine — the weather comes again tomorrow

• Light on your system: only the particle layer animates; weather refreshes every 30 minutes by default (adjustable)

• Multi-monitor support, with per-display region and layer settings

Data & disclaimer

Weather snapshots come from Windy-Data-API (built on Open-Meteo AWS open data / NOAA GFS); cyclone data is parsed from GDACS; map outlines are from Natural Earth. An internet connection is required for live data; when offline, the map and cities still render and cached data is shown.

This is an ambient visualization and casual game. Weather and storm information is simplified and stylized, and may be delayed, cached, interpolated, or unavailable. Do not use it for emergency, navigation, aviation, maritime, or any safety-critical decisions. Not affiliated with , Open-Meteo, GDACS, NOAA, or Natural Earth.